Police Budgets

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 2:24 pm on 18 April 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:24, 18 April 2018

Llywydd, the Prime Minister's disastrous record as Home Secretary is increasingly coming home to roost. Her decision—let's remember that it was her decision—year after year after year to reduce funding for the police—[Interruption.] You forget the times that she turned up at Police Federation conferences lecturing them on the way that they should conduct themselves, while she was, at the same time, taking away from police authorities across England and Wales the wherewithal to allow them to do the vital work that they do. It doesn't matter how many times Conservative Ministers go on the television and radio trying to claim that the slash and burn through police authority budgets has had no impact on crime, because people out there living real lives in real communities simply know that that is not true, and the figures that Mick Antoniw outlined demonstrate that very well. In the Prime Minister's disastrous election campaign last year, one of the issues that she failed to address right through the campaign was Labour's promise that if we were elected, we would restore those budgets and make sure that police numbers were restored to where they were before the Prime Minister set about her campaign of reducing them. Of course reducing budgets for police authorities has an impact on the work that they are able to do and of course the work they are able to do has an impact upon the lives of people in communities in every part of Wales.